As a control freak – not yet in recovery, *lol* I am always curious about how attempting to control everything affects me and everyone around me.

As is typical everything has two sides. On the one hand being organized and efficient can increase productivity and knowing things are handled, helps me relax. On the other hand, when things are not able to be handled in that way, it increases stress and anxiety.

I notice that I also behave differently depending on which side of this I am on. It is this behaviour that I notice affects everything around me and in fact makes it worse, but this I am creating, so I can do something about.

So as an experiment, I decided that for one week instead of trying to “over control” to instead be curious about whatever the situation was / is and what was happening within it.

Besides being rather freeing, it also released a lot of energy and allowed me to be more creative in general.

The more this happened, the inner turmoil lessened no matter what the external stimulus was and the needing to control actually lessened. The bonus was that the more that I released the control, the less reactive I was in general, so nothing actually built to that crazy making state where I felt out of control / the need to control.

All this from being curious. I know I stated this was possible in a previous post, but trying another experiment to validate this for myself with real results, was fun and makes life much easier.

So, are you willing to try your own experiment and see how things may look differently to you?